It was my intention to offer some observations upon the presentation linked through my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook Group. Another nearly overwhelming aspect of the Internet, however, is that it leaves one with a vast amount to address in a finite amount of time. The queue of matters that must be addressed never grows shorter, only longer. Who knows how long it will take to offer my observations.
I find Shelley Maycock's “The 1604 Question,” pleasing especially as it embraces my long time theme of Shakespeare as “serial reviser” (not a phrase that I have used that I am aware). Where our details converge or diverge does not matter for the moment so much as our general agreement. The claim that Shakespeare often rewrote earlier, more primitive plays of lesser playwrights comes only from the need to fit the plays into the little we know of the biography of the Stratford man.
Of course, some of the plays do prove to have been rewritten versions of earlier plays by others. The traditional scholarship is certainly correct regarding The Life and Death of King John, for one example. The first version was largely written by George Peele. Some small amount bears the style of Shakespeare. This, I would assert, reflects the fact that Peele wrote for the boys of the first Blackfriars, and its continuation, after 1584,1 as the Children of St. Paul's, still managed by Edward de Vere and John Lily. The play was probably purchased shortly before the Paul's Boys also ceased performing plays, circa 1589. Vere saw fit to rewrite a promising play that he owned, Peele was satisfied to have received his paycheck, and thus we have the second version with much more Shakespeare and much less Peele. There is considerable reason to believe that something very similar can be said of The Taming of a / the Shrew.
The question as to how much of which plays were written by Shakespeare, at various times between 1576 and 1604, surely seems to guarantee an impossibly snarled mess of possibilities. But it is able, in large part, to be untangled and with remarkable results. The matches to the known biographies and styles of Vere, Peele, Green, Marlowe, et alii, are really quite remarkable.
But the first Leir was decidedly not written by Shakespeare. Neither was the first Henry VI. He did, however, rewrite the former and revise the latter.
It is of particular satisfaction to me to learn that my identification of Love's Labours Won as an earlier title of an earlier version of Much Adoe About Nothing, in my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare (2013, 2017)2, is now considered likely among at least some core Oxfordians.
Moreover, it appears that my Shakespeare in 1573 (2021)3 and Virtual Grub Street articles “Rolfe vs. the Orthodoxy on Shakespeare's Pericles” (2021)4 and “D— W— R— and Pericles as Tudor Theatrical Revue" (2023)5 have also percolated up through the Oxfordian soil. It is now asserted by some that Shakespeare/Vere wrote the whole (neither John Fletcher nor George Wilkins playing any part). That parts and stray passages of the play attributed to Wilkins are actually the 1578-ish version of Vere/Shakespeare peeking out at us.6 It is always a pleasure to learn that one's work has been approved — or at least adopted — by one's fellow workers in the vineyard.
I offer a different theory than Shelley, however, on the topic of censorship. Being an Earl, and closely connected with the Hunsdons, surely Vere did not have to apply to anyone in the companies to have his plays produced. Early on, as a co-writer, at times, in order to introduce himself to the London popular stage, he and his fellows (who Chettle tells us didn't even know who he was7) submitted their plays to the companies which shepherded them through the standard processes for performance and eventual publication. Plays he wrote solo probably went directly through a Lord Hunsdon for their first introduction and were anonymous to all but a few others.
Every sign is that the companies understood that they did not own his plays therefore did not have permission to publish them. The plays published until shortly after Meres outed Vere's pen-name, in 1598, and he had gained a reputation to defend, were likely pirated — perhaps by the wily, avaricious Stratford man who had the name and ready access to the Chamberlain's Men's play scripts. It was only after the name was out that “revised” plays began to appear which were published not so much for the 6l. a piece but for legacy.
1By “boys of Blackfriars,” here, I refer to the combined Children of the Chapel and Children of St. Paul's who acted at Blackfriars between 1580 and 1584. The Children of the Chapel were forbidden to act any longer in 1584. But the combined boys very briefly managed to continue under the guise of Boys of the Earl of Oxford.
2Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Edward De Vere was Shake-speare: at long last, the proof (2013, 2017). 244-5. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1543136257/
3Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021). 85-6, 97. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14
4Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “William J. Rolfe vs. the Orthodoxy on Shakespeare's Pericles”. Virtual Grub Street, November 29, 2021. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2021/11/william-j-rolfe-vs-orthodoxy-on.html
5Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “D— W— R— and Pericles as Tudor Theatrical Revue”. Virtual Grub Street, September 16, 2023. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2023/09/d-w-r-and-pericles-as-tudor-theatrical.html
6Stelting, Michelle Elaine. Redating Pericles (2015). Also floats the idea: “The two seemingly distinct styles in Pericles are often currently considered to be evidence of collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins, but it is also possible that the play was written when the language of the first two acts was current and fashionable, and then subsequent revisions updated the language of the final three acts.” Gilvary, Kevin. Dating Shakespeare's Plays (2010) mentions the earliest possible date but does not take a position on the matter.
7Chettle, Henry. Kind-Hart's Dream (1592). Percy Society ed., 1841. “With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted,... the other whome at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had,... myselfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he exclent in the qualitie he professes: besides, diuers of worship haue reported his vprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that aprooues his art.” It is my theory that Peele was go-between for the manuscript pages contributed to the group's effort by a mysterious person identified only by the moniker “Shake-Speare”.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”
The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
No comments:
Post a Comment